13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

Caxton drove to State College, only a dozen or so miles away, just to get out of the suffocating atmosphere of Pennsyltucky. The tree-lined avenues of the university town were full of students in bright and colorful parkas and windbreakers. They walked in pairs or groups of four or more, laughing amongst themselves, shouldering backpacks, their faces red with the cold but their heads bare. They were alive, that was the main thing. Very much alive, and their concerns were for the simplest things-sex, grades, beer-none of them wanted to skin a ghost or drain the blood of a living victim. They were young, too, unwrinkled, innocent in their own fashion. It did her good to see them.

She was losing it, and she knew it. That she would drive so far just to see young people made her realize just how dark her life had become in such a brief period of time. She pulled into a parking space on College Avenue before a big stone gate that let her look all the way up the quadrangle. She undid her seat belt but didn't get out of the car.

Arkeley looked up. He'd been studying his Blackberry since she'd started driving. "Good news," he told her. "The Investigative Unit has ruled out seventeen of the suspects. They decided to run down the medical personnel and corrections officers first-the ones who might have actually had physical contact with Malvern. They're about half done."

Caxton nodded. That was good news. "Malvern. It all comes back to Malvern. How did she get here?" she asked. "She was in Pittsburgh when you found her, but she wasn't born there, right?"

"No," he said. He put the Blackberry in his coat pocket. "Vampires move around a lot-it's how they stay one step ahead of people like us. It took me years to trace her route and I'm not done yet. I know she was born in Manchester, in England, around 1695. She terrorized that city for about sixty-five years before the bloodlust got too much of her and she couldn't rise any more from her coffin. She lived for a while under the care of another vampire, a Thomas Easling, who was burned at the stake in Leeds in 1783. Malvern's body was found among Easling's property and it was assumed at the time that she was dead, just a mummified corpse. A curio. She was purchased for thirty five British pounds by a Virginian plantation owner, one Josiah Caryl Chess, who fancied himself a scholar of natural history. He had quite a collection of dinosaur and mammal fossils, so a moribund vampire must have been a prize find. He never bothered to remove her heart. She couldn't move, after all, and even though he must have known she was still alive in there in some fashion-he may have even fed her-he was certain she was beyond harming anyone. Most likely she had him under her spell, though his journals suggest just the opposite. He was physically intimate with her at least once."

"Shit, no," Caxton said, her stomach squeezing down like a rubber ball. Caxton remembered then what Arkeley had said about Malvern and her current attendant, Doctor Hazlitt. She had more to offer him, Arkeley had said, then her piercing gaze. "But she would be all... look, I'm sorry if this is gross, but she'd be too dry."

"Personal lubricants have been widely available throughout history. I know the ancient Romans used olive oil. And if you let her, if you play along, she can make herself look however you want. Your ideal woman. The illusion lasts as long as she wants it to."

Something in Arkeley's voice worried her. "You've seen her do it?" Caxton asked. She really wanted to ask if she'd changed her appearance for him-and if he'd succumbed. She couldn't ask that, though, not in so many words. He chuckled. "She's tried plenty of tricks on me. I've been visiting her every few weeks for two decades now-she's been trying to get me on her side this whole time. So far I've resisted." He made it sound as if he couldn't guarantee, even to himself, that he would always be successful. "Anyway. Chess died of blood loss, of course. No one ever officially put the blame on Malvern. She had never moved from her coffin, which was mounted in the front hallway as a kind of conversation piece. Looking back now it's pretty obvious that she sucked Chess dry but at the time they blamed a mutinous slave for his death. They locked Malvern up in the attic and forgot about her. The plantation was burned to the ground during the Civil War and she disappeared for a while. In fact the next time anyone has a record of her is when she showed up in the possession of Piter Byron Lares, and you know how that story goes."

"Lares had plenty of moribund vampires, not just Malvern."

Arkeley agreed. "They take care of their own. It's almost like ancestor worship and it's one of the very few things that can make them act irrationally. I assumed originally that the four vampires in Lares' boat were all of one lineage, that one of them had made Lares while another had made the one who made Lares, and so on. I was wrong. By the time I discovered him Lares had been collecting old vampires for decades. Maybe he thought that by getting blood for them he was doing something good and nurturing. Maybe it helped assuage his conscience, assuming he had some kind of conscience. I don't know. I've been studying vampires for twenty years myself and I still don't know how they think. They're just too alien to us."

Caxton scratched under her armpit. She stared out through the windshield at the eighteen year olds walking by, their arms clutched around each other for warmth, their faces so clean. None of them knew what the future would hold, or what they would become. "You've been working the same case all this time."

"Lots of cops define their careers with one case. The murderer who got away, the child who went missing and never showed up again." Arkeley shrugged. "Alright. You got me. I've never been able to get the Lares case out of my mind. I moved here, to Pennsylvania, to follow up on it. I've spent years getting to know people like the Polders who might have some information. And I've watched Malvern like a hawk."

"And now when someone calls the FBI to say they have a vampire killing, they call you." Caxton frowned. "That's a lot of weight to carry around."

"I do alright," Arkeley told her.

Whatever. She should be focusing on the case, not feeling sorry for Arkeley.

"This is my first serious investigation," she told him. "I'm no detective. But I think I have an idea of what's been going on. Lares kept Malvern going until you killed him. Then, through various bureaucratic channels, she gets installed at that hospital, at Arabella Furnace."

"Right."

"She tries to charm her way out, to talk her way out, she even eats one of the doctors but it's no good. You're sitting on her, just waiting for her to do something bad so you can punish her. She can't just give up, though. She's going to live forever, locked up in a withered corpse of a body forever, so the only option is to keep planning an escape, even if it takes twenty years to pull off. She's getting a little blood but not enough to sustain her. She needs more muscle. So she creates three vampires."

"More likely she created one of them and he created the other two-it would involve less direct risk for her."

Caxton clucked her tongue. "Why three, though?. Why do they even need to bring the blood to her? One vampire could just steal her, coffin and all, and hide her where we'll never find her. Then he could bring her back on his own timetable."

"Her body is too frail to be moved around like that. If she broke in two pieces right now she might never have the strength to put herself back together. She needs to walk out of Arabella Furnace under her own power."

Caxton added that to her store of facts. "Okay. So the big plan is to bring blood to her, the way Lares used to. But a lot of blood this time, enough to completely heal her. To make that happen she creates a vampire. He goes out into the woods and takes over Farrel Morton's hunting camp, makes it his base of operations. He creates some half-deads to keep the place going and creates two more vampires. For months they stay on the down low, eating migrant workers, not showing themselves. Biding their time. But why? Why haven't they tried to free Malvern yet? Do vampires get stronger over time?"

"No-they're never stronger than the first night they rise to hunt."

Caxton nodded. "So the longer they wait the weaker they get, and the more risk they have to live with. Risk that somebody's going to wander by the hunting camp and notice that it's been turned into a mausoleum. Which is in fact pretty much what did happen. If that half-dead hadn't come up against my sobriety check we wouldn't know that any of this was going on. Farrel Morton shows up with his kids, looking for a weekend in the woods. He finds himself in a house of horrors instead. The vampires are so afraid of being discovered that they send a half-dead to dump the bodies somewhere else, to make it look like Morton never even went to the camp. Why go to such lengths? When it didn't work they had to leave home so fast they left their coffins behind. They've got to be desperate by now."

Arkeley nodded.

"Desperate enough to attack the hospital?"

"Malvern's plan isn't ready to be put into action, not yet. She can be an astonishingly patient creature, when it suits her. Still, she doesn't waste opportunities. She'll have a backup plan and she will put it into action as soon as possible. Still, I don't expect an attack right away. I believe I know why the three of them were biding their time."

"Yeah?"

"It's simple logistics. She needs a certain quantity of blood. Three vampires couldn't bring her enough blood to fully revivify her. Four of them could. They were going to make another one."

"Christ. But now-they're down to two, half of what they need. That's something, right? It's a good thing."

Arkeley scowled at her. "It buys us some time, that's all."

Caxton looked up. While they'd been sitting there talking the last of the afternoon had faded away. A streak of yellow marked the western horizon-the sun was going down. In perhaps fifteen minutes it would be dark. "People," she said, "are going to die tonight, one way or the other."

Arkeley didn't bother to confirm it. He was too busy reaching for the Blackberry that buzzed urgently in his jacket pocket. When her cell phone began to ring as well she knew something must have happened. Something bad.